Kognitio, driving the convergence of Big Data, in-memory analytics and cloud computing, today announced the latest version of the Kognitio Analytical Platform. The enhanced version features improvements that enable greater connectivity across standard programming languages, as well as greatly enhanced speed. The result gives companies of all sizes the ability to perform in-depth analytics on immense data sets faster than ever before, and gets them the answers they need in a fraction of the time required by competing solutions.

Version 8 of the Kognitio Analytical Platform was announced today at the beginning of the Hadoop Summit, being held in San Jose. Kognitio is a Platinum Sponsor of the conference.

The Kognitio Analytical Platform offers “NoSQL” or “not only-SQL” processing, with massively parallel processing (MPP) execution of any script or binary code, such as R, Python or Java. It also enables the use of libraries for text parsing and semantic analysis. This important capability takes Kognitio beyond the confines of a MPP SQL database to becoming an MPP engine for any data analytics processes, with the added benefit that these potentially complex processes can be managed.

An external tables capability facilitates an ‘information anywhere’ approach that provides direct connectivity with immediate access on an as-needed basis to any data source. This enables data to persist wherever it can be most efficiently and cost-effectively stored. The current version of the Kognitio Analytical Platform offers connectivity with Hadoop clusters, high-speed connectivity with Amazon’s S3 cloud-based storage and the Kognitio persistent disk storage, available at no additional charge.

“We have been using Kognitio v8 in our test/development environments, and are very encouraged by its performance enhancements and additional functionality,” said Chris Shelmerdine, Technical Architect for a large retail customer loyalty management firm. “The new features in the Kognitio Analytical Platform will pave the way for us to provide unique and powerful capabilities to our end users. We are recommending all future new clients and POCs are run on the new codebase with Kognitio v8 underpinning the application,” added Shelmerdine, whose firm has used Kognitio for years.

Tests performed on the version 8 of the Kognitio Analytical Platform, using the industry-standard Transaction Processing Performance Council-Decision Support (TPC-DS) benchmark, show a twofold increase in the query throughput rate over previous versions for any given platform. This is due to Kognitio’s true in-memory capability, which has offered the industry’s fastest analytical processing for years, and is especially important in today’s environments, where companies need to analyze up to dozens of terabytes of key data at one time: they require answers within seconds or minutes, not hours or days.

“The latest additions to the Kognitio Analytical Platform make it possible for more companies than ever to expand the range of insights they can gain from its use,” said Roger Gaskell, Kognitio Chief Technical Officer. “Kognitio now provides the full range of capabilities for firms, meaning they can use it to get the answers they need from relatively simple queries to the most complex set of analytics the can imagine. This is doubly important as firms of all sizes embrace Big Data and its enabling technologies like Hadoop.”

The latest version of the Kognitio Analytical Platform also offers:
— High speed data export, added to the already available multi-threaded high speed import functions, enabling ultra-fast back-up,
— Super fast restart, reusing exiting memory images without re-load restart, and
— In-memory compression added as an optional feature.